Protecting the ownership of digital content, such as multimedia content and the like, and the usage rights of authorized users of such content has, in recent years, become very important. The importance of protecting such content will inevitably continue to grow as the content is more easily distributed, particularly in the environment of computing networks such as the Internet.
There are many scenarios that can benefit and thrive from content protection techniques. For example, movie content providers can more easily sell content directly to individuals when the providers are assured that their content will be protected. Additionally, users can more easily and conveniently receive content from subscription style services (such as cable providers, pay-per-view digital satellite, and the like). Further, users can store and playback content at a later date or make copies for themselves, while still ensuring that the content owner's rights are still maintained. Additionally, users can create their own content and know that they can restrict who can view it. For example, a user could post private home videos to a web site and only allow other family members to view it for a limit period of time.
When content is provided to a device and played for a user, a well defined architecture (with both software and hardware components) is typically required to coordinate playback and to ensure that digital rights are protected and maintained. Often times protected content is transferred to a user's device (e.g. a computing device, set top box and the like) from a content source such as a video web server or even from a local hard drive. The content can typically be encoded or compressed and encrypted at the content source. Subsequently, the user's device decrypts the content, decompresses it, and displays or otherwise renders the content for the user on, for example, a monitor and/or speakers.
Content is typically protected using digital rights management (DRM) techniques that continue to develop and evolve. DRM techniques typically utilize software that enables secure distribution and, perhaps more importantly, disables illegal distribution of paid content over a network such as the Web. Current DRM efforts have focused primarily on securing audio content. However, as the bandwidth of networks increases, distributing video directly to end users will become technically efficient and feasible. Valuable digital content is also now becoming increasingly available through other sources such as digital TV, digital cable or via digital media.
In the future, architectures for enabling a user to experience digital content will have to exist that resist circumvention and unauthorized access by both users and by adversarial entities. At the same time, the architectures should be flexible enough to grant legitimate access to any trusted component, should allow new applications, software components and hardware devices to be used with protected content, work with a variety of different types of media, and provide some mechanism to authenticate and play content on remote hardware devices such as hand held PDAs, play to remote digital speakers, and the like.
Architectures also need to be flexible and abstracted enough so that only the lower infrastructure layers are required to be trusted, thereby allowing untrusted applications to play protected content without knowledge of it being protected.
Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing improved methods and systems for processing renderable digital data in a manner that provides a desirable degree of flexible security.